Using Compete.com to sell SEO

Last week I posted about Selling Your SEO Project and this week I want to expand upon that a little bit. In particular, let’s look at how a Compete.com chart can help you in making that sale. Here is our scenario:

(Note: we are not affiliated with any of these companies or anyone else in that sells tents. I also do not know who tentsforsale.org considers their top competitors, but follow me here for a bit).

Let’s see what happens when you search on the all important head term tents:

and here are some more of the results:

What we see is eurekatents.com in the #1 position, trailtents.com in the #7 position, and tentsforsale.org in the #8 position. So for those of us in the SEO biz, the reason for working on the SEO for tentsforsale.org need no further discussion. We know that we can bring in new business to the company by doing so.

However, not every company is born with an understanding of SEO, and what it means in terms of traffic to move up in the search rankings. You can show this situation to a budget manager and they may not understand what kind of ROI you can get with that investment. So let’s show him. This is where a nice Compete.com chart can help (note you can do similar things with Alexa and Quantcast):

Looking at this chart it looks like eurekatent.com (the blue line) is getting 6 times as much traffic as tentsforsale.org (the green line) and about the same traffic as trailtents.com (the red line). You can also see a drastic shift in traffic for eurekatents.com throughout the year that suggests that they run a very hefty paid search campaign. Even adjusting for that, it still looks like eurekatents.com is getting at least 4 times as much organic traffic as tentsforsale.org.

In many cases, this will be all you need to convince a reluctant budget manager. This will be especially true if they have competitive personalities, or have reasons to dislike the competitors.

Comments

Are you using the free Compete charts? If so, I think you might want to caveat some of those assumptions. Because the free charts just show “overall” traffic and not the sources of traffic (e.g. Direct, SEO, SEM, Ad Network, etc.)

I’m not saying this is true, but Eurkatent might have very the same level of search engine referral traffic as TrailTents.com and Tentsforsale.org. The inflated traffic might be from offline advertisements, ad networks, or other paid sources. Although it’s unlikely, but the dramatic differences can’t necessarily be attributed to SEM or other source without knowing the origins of the sources.

Eric, I agree with the first commenter, running with this is dangerous, but can be mitigated by using a tool like spyfu in conjunction with some kind of analysis on brand mentions, PR pushes, etc which would help further attribute the spikes to seo.